Ames Patch Q&A with Mayor Ann Campbell

Ames Mayor Ann Campbell moved to Ames in 1967 and served on the City Council for several years before she was elected mayor in 2006. Ames Patch caught up with her to talk about the city's future and challenges.

Ames Patch: You must spend countless hours fulfilling your duty as Ames mayor. Why do you do it?

Ann Campbell: I feel very committed that we need leadership that's willing to listen to all sides and hopefully have a lot of contacts with a variety of constituents in the town and I was encouraged to run after having been on Council for a number of years.

Ames Patch: What has been Ames' greatest accomplishment since you've been here?

Campbell: I'm not sure that there's any one great accomplishment. We've had a variety. It's easy to look and say, you've built something. You've built a pool and whatnot. I like to think that we're bringing issues to consensus and I can't take the sole credit for that. Certainly we have had some very, very challenging issues and we are not there yet.

Ames Patch: Is there anything you're most proud of. What do you like to brag about when you talk about Ames?

Campbell: There's a variety of things we brag about. I think that the ability of the university and the city to work together and be basically a joint operation is something that is the envy of lots of college communities. I think we've done very well with that and that makes it easier to be in government than it would be elsewhere.

Ames Patch: What's the biggest issue facing Ames today?

Campbell: I'm not sure we can pick any single issue. We are always looking at the subject of growth and how to grow responsibly and taking everybody's interests in mind. ... I think we have challenges in our commercial area. We need more commercial entities here and that is a challenge particularly in this economy.

Ames Patch: What will be Ames' biggest challenge in the future?

Campbell: What I just zeroed in on: How you grow responsibly. Simply for revenue purposes we certainly need more commercial and we need more industrial. And one of the challenges we have in that is the whole tax structure that is dictated to us by the state Legislature. I probably spent more time this past year at the state Legislature than I ever spent looking at the ramifications of any changes in property tax.